Glenn Greenwald has another great piece in Salon attacking the lockstep support for Israel in Congress in the face of massacres. The problem is that the astute Greenwald still has no explanation of why we are experiencing this meltdown in democracy. If the religious/political issue were abortion or gay rights, there would be no confusion on the left: we would blame a social faction, a religious lobby. But in this case we do not finger that lobby, because Jews tend to be so liberal, and the Israel lobby is our sisters and our cousins and our aunts (as Gilbert and Sullivan observed).
The left would always prefer to blame Bush and Cheney and John Hagee.
I dwell on this issue all the time because you can't fight something
without knowing its true identity. Also, because in my own
media experience, I constantly ran up against precisely this factor:
pro-Israel feelings among powerful editors and publishers, coupled with
fear of retaliation by readers, advertisers, the well-connected.
Here on Counterpunch is a fabulous piece (sent to me by Jeff Blankfort) by two writers in Paris, Diane Johnstone and Jean Bricmont, making my point: saying that the left must get past its belief that Israel is blindly supported for imperialist/structural reasons.
Bricmont/Johnstone:
Many
people, especially on the left, persist in thinking that Israel is only
a pawn in an American capitalist or imperialist strategy to control the
Middle East. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Israel is of no
use to anybody or anything but its own fantasies of domination. There
is no petroleum in Israel, or Lebanon, or Golan, or Gaza. The so-called
wars for oil, in 1991 and 2003, were waged by the United States, with
no help from Israel, and in 1991 with the explicit demand from the
United States that Israel stay out (because Israel’s participation
would have undermined Washington’s Arab coalition). For the pro-Western
petro-monarchies and the "moderate" Arab regimes, Israel’s ongoing
occupation of Palestinian lands is a nightmare, which radicalizes much
of their populations and threatens their rule. It is Israel, by its
absurd policies, that provoked the creation of both Hezbollah and Hamas
and that is indirectly responsible for much of the recent growth of
"radical Islam".
However,
the main reason for the silence [of Israel's critics] is surely not guilt precisely because
it is so artificial, but rather fear. Fear of "what will they think",
fear of slander and even of being taken to court for "anti-Semitism".
If you are not convinced, take a journalist, a politician or a
publisher to some spot where nobody is listening and there is no hidden
camera or microphone, and ask whether he or she says in public all he
or she thinks of Israel in private. And if not, why? Fear of hurting
the interests of capitalism? Fear of weakening American imperialism?
Fear of interrupting oil deliveries? Or, on the contrary, fear of
Zionist organizations and their relentless campaigns?
